Global reach, global recourse
On Goliath looking in the mirror, or the NBA as a 24/7/365 self-masticating news machine.
When a punch falls in practice and no one’s there to leak it, it’s a lot easier to spin as a routine case of competitive temperaments running hot, but operational. When the footage, all 30, grainy seconds of it, got out two days after Draymond Green walked up to Jordan Poole in practice and punched him in the face, it became, as the initial stories that followed suggested in noting Poole went on to “finish his workouts” that day, more difficult to frame as Green challenging a teammate.
Since, there’s a lot that’s been made about Green going forward. Where this puts him as a leader of the Warriors or even on a downturn in his career, and necessarily so. Green’s subsequent explanations for the assault have shied from accountability, as he’s has done in the past when pressed to own up to his actions or the things he’s said. In Green’s apology, he shifted a lot of the fallout onto Poole. He underscores the embarrassment Poole and his family must be feeling, frames rebuilding the relationship with Poole being on Poole (which, true, but not on Green to flag), and stresses focusing on the job at hand — being basketball — and getting back to it. I want to trust where Green was contrite, personal, and acknowledged the bad place he was in the day of that practice. Beyond the personal, everyone knows and has experienced in relationships how things shift, can sour, so I’m curious about what time away from the team looks like for Green and for Golden State. But the underlying point, to me, since TMZ released the footage, has been the reaction — Green’s, Steve Kerr’s, the general collective of those who’ve watched it — to the clip’s public existence.
When Green gets to the leak of the video, that’s where his disdain swells. His incredulity that it got out, that there isn’t accompanying audio, that it looked as bad as it did and that it surprised him, how bad he looked, when he watched it back “fifteen times, maybe more”. Several times he mentions the video “serves the purpose it was supposed to serve”, hinting at a calculated character assassination, which, coming at the end of his presser, skewers a lot of the apology that came before it.
Green’s feelings about the video out in the world, existing, matched Kerr’s, who spoke after him:
This is why it’s so crucial to keep things in-house. I’ve been in this league for 30-plus years. I’ve seen all kinds of crazy stuff. When things are kept internally it’s really, almost easy, to handle them. It’s so much cleaner and smoother and you can move forward. As soon as things are leaked, now all hell breaks loose. And that affects every single player, coach, but especially the players. Because of that, because everything is out there, the players are now having to deal with all of this stuff, we’re having to answer all these questions, and it puts us in a very difficult spot. It’s like if you had a camera in your family and there was a family dispute, would you really want to discuss it with the world?
Kerr isn’t wrong, but he’s also not referring to a world that exists anymore. The NBA, by its own and our collective hand, has turned into a 24/7/365 self-masticating news machine. More than that, a rabid, reactionary, routinely frothing machine. When cultivating at that kind of clip there isn’t anything, whether speculative, peripheral or personal, that isn’t up for discussion, ceaselessly. In the NBA, news is everything, anything, and news is now currency. Whoever leaked the video knows that, but they know that because they’re part of the same for-profit structure we’re all pushing to varying degrees by the way we watch, react, support, talk about, or clamour for more. We can’t clutch pearls that something got out when we’re so quick to share and share again that it did. There’s plenty to be said, too, for the value an organization like the Warriors places on what it considers proprietary, like practice footage, but not the worth of the people whose hands put it all together.
There’s a mirror, in how Green and Kerr were rankled most not by the video’s existence, but that it shifted so quickly into public domain. Nobody likes to be caught out, but theirs is a disdain for the knowing shattering of illusion, like they preferred the funhouse mirror that might paint aggression or violence as competition for how it reflected the experience to everyone on the outside. To say that all hell has broken loose over half a minute of cell phone footage that involves two co-workers, in a controlled environment, with plenty of people witnessing the event in real-time, suggests that it is not the event itself that unleashed hell. It also suggests that this is not a hot seat to which the franchise is familiar.
I don’t think there was anything, as Green seemed to hint at, nefarious in the video’s release, meant to paint him in any other light than what is still made deliberately clear from the low definition footage of a very fast event, and the “cleaner and smoother” aspect Kerr referred too never actually existed in this case. What’s clean, in this case, is only what’s clandestine. Kerr just says the quiet, company line out loud — keep it internal. To be put in a difficult spot is really just a public one, to have a whole lot of eyes on you as you set out on the steps forward.
The surprise, to me, is in what’s been so surprising, either in the reception of the video or how wide and far it’s reached. The NBA is a global lifestyle brand that has, for a long time, stretched beyond the tidy lines and high shine of the courts where the product gets played. Or even after that, when the product is chopped up and parcelled out for future repetitive consumption. There is no other pro sports league touting the size, the kind of familiarity with its athletes, their perceived accessibility, or the malleability of product, the extension of status and cool basketball lends by design in fashion, entertainment, technology, even politics, than the NBA has. Where other leagues have tried they’ve failed, or stopped short in realizing to gain those kinds of benefits comes an overarching social accountability. Or at least, the public pressures of one.
With the Warriors, you don’t get to become the biggest, dynastic franchise, reaping the rewards of the league’s keen expansionism, and cry foul that things used to be a lot more intimate, in-house, smaller. They did, but then the NBA turned, through years of targeted marketing, outreach, personnel and player development, plus occasional missteps, into this. To shift back to mirrors: Golden State, as league Goliath, ought to look into one. As for Kerr’s analogy of, essentially, home videos, you do have to discuss what’s happened in the sanctity of your own home with the world, when you’ve actively, keenly, invited the world in.